The New NAFTA

Late last night, Canada, Mexico, and the United States agreed to a revision of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). They are calling it the United States‐​Mexico‐​Canada Agreement (USMCA), which is a pointless exercise in rebranding, but not worth agonizing about. We suspect that many people will just keep calling it NAFTA.

If you are curious, the full text is here but it is a slog. We are slowly making our way through it, and ultimately will provide an assessment of whether this new deal is net liberalizing. If you are interested in some more technical details, check out the blog posts at the International Economic Law and Policy blog.

If you want to get a general sense of what’s in it, here’s a basic overview. Overall, the new agreement is kind of a mixed bag. There are some improvements, mainly the liberalization of a few Canadian agricultural sectors. However, the agreement is made worse in some ways by making it harder for autos to qualify for zero tariffs. The new agreement has also been modernized by including some recent Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) innovations, which is good. But there are systemic provisions that are not very good. All in all, it is not a terrible deal, although U.S. government resources probably would have been better spent on liberalizing trade with countries with whom we did not already have a trade agreement.